Nathaniel Hawthorne Background for The House of the Seven Gables
Born in Salem, Massachusetts Family with Puritan history Great great great grandson of John Hathorne – one of the three judges in the Salem Witch Trials (1690s) Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne’s Background Married Sophie Peabody in 1842, three children A shy member of a famous literary circle: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and President Franklin Pierce Few copyright laws meant that Hawthorne had difficulty supporting himself with his writing. He held many other jobs including publisher, a political appointment at the Boston custom house and later as political consul in England The Scarlet Letter ( 1850) was an oft-pirated bestseller Published The House of the Seven Gables in 1851
The Turner-Ingersoll House AKA The House of the Seven Gables
Cult of Domesticity Ideology also known as Cult of True Womanhood CoD emerged during the nineteenth century when women lost their status as producers of household industry in an increasingly industrialized society. CoD naturalized the exclusion of (middle class white) women from new business world and by relegating them to the “proper sphere” of the home. Publications like Godey’s idealized woman as Angel in the House: expected to fulfill the roles of a calm and nurturing mother, a loving and faithful wife, and a passive, delicate, and virtuous creature Set home/private space as directly opposed to and as a refuge from the calculating, dehumanizing (male) economic world.
Daguerreotypes photographic images made when a layer of photo-sensitive plate was exposed to a scene or image through a lens. Importance of Light: Mercury vapor condensed on those places on the plate where the exposure light was most intense (highlights), and less so in darker areas of the image (shadows). No Copies: Daguerreotypes can’t be directly transferred onto another light-sensitive medium the way that photographic negatives can. Art or artifice? Art or science?